THE STORY OF THE GREAT YORKSHIRE CIRCUS

The Great Yorkshire Circus started with a story about a circus that had once travelled around Yorkshire and then disappeared. Here's the story in the words of the founder, Jamie Hudson. 

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The story centred around a circus owner called Mr Montgomery, an old diary and the remains of a travelling circus that had somehow been left behind. As with many old circus stories, it is difficult to know exactly where the facts end and the folklore begins, but there was enough to the story to make us curious. The idea that there had once been a small travelling circus moving from town to town around Yorkshire seemed to fit perfectly with the sort of circus we wanted to create.

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I have always worked in theatre and live entertainment rather than traditional circus. Over the years I have produced shows, promoted concerts, worked with performers and spent a considerable amount of time dealing with all the things that audiences never see. I also run a Victorian theatre in Yorkshire, so I have always had a particular interest in old theatres, traditional entertainment and the way that live shows used to be presented.

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The more I thought about circus, the more I realised that there were actually quite a lot of similarities. A theatre creates a world for an audience for a couple of hours, and a circus does exactly the same thing, except that instead of building a theatre and putting a show inside it, you arrive with the theatre itself. The trucks arrive, the tent goes up, the lights are installed, the performers move in and suddenly you have created an entire little world in the middle of a field.

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That was the bit that really appealed to me.

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COLLECTING THE PIECES

The Great Yorkshire Circus wasn't something that we sat down and designed from scratch. It has developed gradually over the last few years, and much of it has come from simply finding things that seemed right and deciding to keep them.

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We started collecting old circus equipment and various bits and pieces that could eventually form part of the show. Then came the vehicles, the caravans and all the other things that are needed to make a travelling circus actually work. At the time, some of these purchases probably looked slightly mad. It is difficult to explain to somebody why you need another old vehicle or another piece of equipment when you don't actually have a circus yet.

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But gradually we had enough pieces to start putting the idea together properly.

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The important thing was that we didn't want to buy an existing circus and simply put a new name on it. We wanted to build something ourselves and, importantly, create a reason for all of these old and new pieces to exist together.

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That is where the story came in.

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MAKING A CIRCUS INTO A SHOW

Coming from theatre, I found myself wanting to do something slightly different with the traditional circus format. I love the acts themselves, but I have always believed that audiences remember a show because of the experience and the story around it, rather than simply remembering a list of things they saw.

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So we started asking what would happen if the circus itself became part of the story.

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Instead of simply introducing an act and moving on to the next one, we could create characters, give them their own history and allow the audience to discover the circus as the story developed. The old equipment we had collected could become part of that world, and the idea of the lost Yorkshire circus could sit quietly underneath everything without necessarily telling the audience exactly what was true and what wasn't.

That became the starting point for the show.

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We wanted people to feel that they had actually arrived at a travelling circus, rather than simply walked into a tent to watch a performance.

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THE TRAVELLING CIRCUS

One of the things I find most fascinating about traditional circus is the travelling side of it. There is something incredibly satisfying about the idea of a circus arriving in a town, putting up its tent and creating a theatre from nothing.

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It is a very old way of putting on a show, but there is something quite magical about it.

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The audience sees the trucks arrive, they see the tent go up and they see the lights and entrance being put together. For a short time, a piece of empty land becomes a theatre, and then, a few days later, the whole thing disappears and moves on to somewhere else.

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That is the tradition we wanted to be part of.

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We have no ambition to create the biggest circus in the country. In fact, quite the opposite. The Great Yorkshire Circus is deliberately small enough to travel, small enough to feel personal and small enough to visit towns that might never see one of the huge touring circus productions.

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Most importantly, it is Yorkshire.

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The plan is to travel around the county, visiting different towns and becoming part of each place for a short time before packing everything away and moving on to the next one.

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BUILDING IT

Of course, the romantic idea of travelling around Yorkshire in a circus is considerably easier than actually making it happen.

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There is a huge amount of work involved in turning the idea into something that can physically travel. We have had to work out how everything fits together, how the trucks are loaded, where the performers live, how the audience enters the tent, how the stage works, how the lighting and sound are transported and how we can put the whole thing together quickly enough to make travelling worthwhile.

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There have been plenty of mistakes along the way and quite a few occasions when I have wondered why I ever thought starting a circus was a sensible idea.

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But slowly, all those individual pieces have started to become one thing.

The vehicles, the tent, the entrance, the scenery, the costumes, the lighting and the show itself have all been developed with the same idea in mind. We want the whole experience to feel as though it belongs to the same circus, rather than being a collection of equipment that happens to be under the same tent.

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A NEW YORKSHIRE CIRCUS

Although the inspiration comes from traditional circus, we are not trying to recreate a circus from a particular year or pretend that we are still living in the 1950s.

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The Great Yorkshire Circus is a new circus, but one that takes a lot of inspiration from the past.

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We have taken the things we love about traditional travelling circus, the tent, the trucks, the characters, the music, the atmosphere and the sense of occasion, and combined them with everything we have learnt from working in modern theatre and live entertainment.

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The result is something that is hopefully familiar but also completely our own.

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And that brings us back to where the whole thing started.

An old story about a forgotten circus in Yorkshire.

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We don't know how much of that story is completely true, and perhaps we never will. But it gave us the idea, and the idea gave us the excuse to start collecting all the things that eventually became the Great Yorkshire Circus.

A few years later, we have a travelling circus of our own.

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And now it is time to take it back onto the Yorkshire roads.

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Perhaps one day somebody will find an old programme, a photograph or a diary from the Great Yorkshire Circus and wonder who we were and where we went.

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If that happens, I hope they tell a good story too.

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Jamie Hudson, 2025